Here is another way to consider the dynamic and how it feeds back into the conceptual;

As mobile organisms we have a sequential perception process, necessary to navigate our environment. We then narrate our journeys to one another and build civilizations out of the accumulated knowledge. Which makes this sequential passage of time fundamental to human reality. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration, using the speed of light to correlate with measures of distance.

Yet the evident reality, with a little bit of perspective, is that it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.

So time is emergent from and an effect of this dynamic state, we refer to as the present. Similar to temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could even use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and pressure with volume, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequencing of thought. It could reasonably be argued the left, logical side of the brain is a clock and right, emotional, intuitive side is a thermostat.

Yet what does this mean, other than one will be excluded from any discussions of physics?

For the last 100 thousand years, humanity has been going forth and multiplying, but now we seem to be getting close to the edge of the global petri dish. This forward, goal oriented, ideals based culture will eventually have to come to terms with the fact nature is more about cycles and feedback, than ideals, goals and destinations. Without the ups and downs, it’s just a flatline.

For example, efficiency is to do more with less, so the ideal of efficiency would be to do everything with nothing. More is not always better, or even possible. Waves do crest.

Reality would seem to be a dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests.

Energy expresses as process, going from one event to the next, as form expresses as patterns, building and decaying. All we see and measure are the patterns, so form seems elemental, but it is expressions of the process.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Individuals go birth to death, while the species goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. Consciousness goes from one thought to the next, as these thoughts come and go.

We are the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, as the motor driving us on, along with a central nervous system to sort through and referee the multitudes of input and impulse.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in, in a cosmic convection cycle.

Society is the raw energies, desires and impulses bubbling up, as civil and cultural forms coalesce in, giving it some form and direction, until the structure gets too confining and cracks appear, allowing the energies to bubble up, like lava and cool into new forms. Thermodynamics rules.

So we are at a stage where the old structures are breaking down and those raw energies are running up against limits they never had to address before.

It is a very frightening time, as well as one of huge potential. We are more towards the end of the beginning, than the beginning of the end, as life starts coalescing into the larger organism it is striving to build, with humanity as the central nervous system.

So just because the public world is getting ever more disconnected and delusional, isn’t necessarily abnormal, just evidence of a stage coming to its end. The end is just punctuation within a larger cycle.